This is not the kids' problem

What galls me is that a structural defect of capitalism has been dumped on young people like my students

A British graduate looks for work in London. 'The Dutch have experimented with dividing a full-time job into two or even three parts, with government providing ­supplemental income support.' Photograph: UK Stock Images Ltd / Alamy/Alamy

Wednesday 4 July 2012 14.00 EDT
First published on Wednesday 4 July 2012 14.00 EDT

Too many people, we all know, are chasing too few jobs. It's an especially depressing prospect for young graduates, who face doing work, if they can find it at all, which does not make use of their talents. For the past decade, I've been talking through with my own students how to deal with this grim prospect; there are solutions but none of them is pretty.

It's no mystery why Europe is short of work. Save on its northern rim, Europe 30 years ago began exporting manufacturing jobs to other parts of the world; managerial and office positions followed in their wake. Today, countries like Brazil, China, and India are building up the high-skill labour Europeans thought we'd keep for ourselves. Britain has held on to financial services, but the City can't make up for the shortfall in the country.

In one way, universities have made this situation worse. At the postgraduate level they take in ever more foreigners who can pay the stiff fees – post-graduate courses can cost as much as £15,000, and there is little financial support for British students at this level. So the country is exporting skills as well as jobs. You could, if you were Theresa May, think the solution is to keep the foreigners out, but without government cash for our own students, many of these masters and doctoral courses would simply collapse.

But at a personal level, what should a kid do? One answer I've explored with my students is emigration. There are in fact plenty of jobs for British graduates in the Far East and in Latin America, where British degrees are in demand. As always, emigration carries a high personal human cost – loss of connection with family and friends, the risk that life may move on and you may not be able to return. Since I teach a rarified subject – social theory – I put the issue to my own students like this: do you care so much about your work that you would abandon home? Increasingly, many are willing.

A less drastic answer involves dealing with "flexible" labour markets – "flexible" means short-term work with no job security and few prospects for advancement; if the current government has its way and employers are able to fire on a whim, labour will become even more flexible on these terms. One way my students deal with this is to make unstable day jobs tolerable by night work of a more sustained, personally meaningful kind, like writing a book or doing voluntary service. This, however, is a solution only for highly motivated, inner-driven kids, and it requires a thick psychological hide; daytime stress, insecurity and depression can dislodge the night anchor.

Our masters celebrate the entrepreneur, and for a few of my students the startup is an option so long as they do not fear failure. About 60% of small businesses fail in their first year, and 76%-80% in three years, principally for lack of capital. I've students of Kant who have set up a co-operative food network, and a Hegel student who has organised a lesbian dating service (what would The Master say?); better, they think, to fail than to regret – but this is no long-term recipe for a whole generation. What galls me about the current situation is that a structural problem of capitalism has been dumped into the lives of young people as their personal problem; even though emigration, the night anchor, and the startup can help some, the system remains intact.

There are, however, ways to prevent young graduates becoming a truly lost generation, if only business, government, and universities are willing.

The most potent of these solutions is job-sharing. The Dutch have experimented with dividing a fulltime job into two or even three parts, with government providing supplemental income support. The experiments acknowledge job scarcity as a fact of life, but respond in ways that keep people in work, avoiding the costs and the confidence-destroying conditions of the dole. To make job-sharing work, both business and government have to think about how labour can be organised cooperatively, which our Northern neighbour does and we do not. We ought to start doing so with entry-level jobs.

I've been appalled at how Britain has mismanaged apprenticeships for young people, both at the paltry number of apprenticeships and the lack of commitment to young people taken into on-the-job training. The Germans have managed matters much better; they provide hands-on training for a lot of young people, and the promise of work is real. Not incidentally, the bond across the generations within German businesses has convinced employers to keep work at home whenever they can, rather than exporting it; generational continuity gives their businesses a solidity and shared knowledge base many of our businesses lack.

Perhaps surprisingly in this regard, I'd like to see universities stop preparing young people for the work world, at least as they now attempt to do. Part of the problem is misplaced specificity: if you have a BA in hotel catering management and there are no jobs for hotel caterers you are, as it were, in the soup. Moreover, universities have expanded massively the numbers of students taking supposedly practical courses, making the problem of scarcity only worse; this year in Britain thousands of students will graduate with MBA's to then compete for a relatively scant number of jobs. We would do much better to provide young people with intellectual challenge and depth – which is what universities are properly about. The number of jobs would not thereby increase; the integrity of the academic enterprise would.

If young people today prove a lost generation, it is only because government, business and academia have failed them. There are remedies to prevent this failure, but Britain has radically to revise its beliefs and labour practices to take this medicine. So far, instead, we've made finding one's place in the work world a personal problem.